But those revelations, based on leaks from former NSA contractor Edward Snowden, were accompanied by remarkable advances in wireless communications. The Snowden documents also galvanized new efforts at making the Internet more secure and private.

The latest version of Apple’s operating system includes the capacity to automatically toggle between different wireless technologies—such as 4G and Wi-Fi—which is a prelude to the use of data-encoding technologies that might split up data and use multiple channels at the same time for far more efficient service. Akamai and Ericsson, meanwhile, teamed up to figure out how to carve out a special wireless data fast lane for customers who pay extra to get things like e-commerce transactions completed as fast as possible.

Mobile devices not only got faster this year but also more intelligent. Increasingly, they’ll be engineered to sense their surroundings—and your intentions—to make them more helpful and easy to use.

With this year’s release of the iPhone 5, for example, came a special processor dedicated to analyzing the phone’s motions. This will allow for a more-efficient fitness app. But it also will make possible new kinds of gesture recognition or other apps that make use of always-on sensing. Similarly, the new Moto X, released in 2013 from Google’s Motorola Mobility, includes a processor that always detects and analyzes ambient sounds. This will allow voice-activated “wake up” commands, but is also the first step toward technologies that might do things like automatically compensate for a loud environment or even identify the person you are talking to.

Broadcast news: Aereo sends broadcast television shows to its customers by assigning each user one of the tiny antennas (seen here) it has deployed in a data center.

A group at the University of California, Berkeley, even launched a village-based micro-telecommunications company at a remote Indonesian site, where a base station is now roped into a tree. This demonstrated a way to run networks without the involvement of major national carriers.